Snapchat, the Venice Beach-based fleeting image app, has announced a $60-million round of funding led by Institutional Venture Partners.

The start-up, which enables users to send friends photos and videos that disappear seconds after they're viewed, also said 200 million "snaps" are transmitted through the platform a day -- impressive considering the company is just 2 years old.

"We’ve been able to support the growth of Snapchat with minimal overhead," the company said in a blog post Monday announcing the deal. "But in order to continue scaling while developing the Snapchat experience, we needed to build a bigger engineering team and figure out how to pay our server bills."

General Catalyst, Benchmark Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and SV Angel also participated in the round.

Institutional Venture Partners, a later-stage venture-capital firm based in Menlo Park, Calif., said in its own blog post that the financing round for Snapchat was "intensely competitive -- one of the most competitive financings we have been a part of in years."

The firm gave several reasons for investing in Snapchat, including its strength in mobile, its popularity with the younger demographic, its unique position as a tech-start up in L.A. and growth and engagement metrics that "are off the charts."

Last month, Snapchat co-founder and Chief Executive Evan Spiegel said in an interview with The Times that the company had a number of developments in the works and that it would "raise money as necessary to keep the snaps flowing."

"We have a really cool product road map and we're really focused on executing on that," Spiegel said. "We are something like half a percent down the path, if that."

In the last few weeks, Snapchat has rolled out a redesign of the app, followed over the weekend by the launch of SnapKidz, a version of Snapchat aimed at the under-13 crowd.

Snapchat was founded in 2011 by Spiegel and co-founder Bobby Murphy, two former Stanford University students.